An Introduction to The Digital Lab

What is a Digital Lab?

A digital lab is a service that sits between the traditional post-house and the production as it shoots.

This intermediate service offers specialised knowledge to handle modern digital production techniques, overseeing the often complex shooting, colour and delivery requirements that studios currently request.

Roles and responsibilities

  • By developing a data management strategy that follows strict compliance procedures, helps to minimise the risk of data loss. This could comprise of checksum verified offloads to multiple storage destinations, and protocols to ensure that media is distributed across several remote locations.

  • The process of tagging and updating camera media with flags, slate information and other metadata to ensure that media can be searched and retreived quickly.

  • Modern digital cameras generate colour images using proprietary processes, each manufacturer will have their own process. It's important that when shooting, a robust colour management system is put into place. A digital lab can help supervise this and ensure that what is viewed on set matches during the conform process.

  • Akin to how a film lab processes with chemicals, when generating media for editorial delivery, the digital lab processes the original camera files. These processed files are smaller and have colour applied to them to make them suitable for editing.

  • Strict protocols are followed to ensure that media archived to LTO tape follows studio requirements. Documentation is produced showing the archival status of each clip of media.

Why is it important?

Centralised Point of Information and Data Management

The digital lab acts as a central hub of all things related to digital workflow, media management and metadata. Camera media, sound and set generated reports such as camera and script reports are cross-referenced for anomalies each shooting day and archived.

Workflow Supervision

The digital lab works with the finishing (post) house and the DIT to ensure that the elements of the digital workflow are scalable and efficient. The workflow is supervised throughout the production. As additional cameras and shooting formats are introduced, new colour pipelines may need to be developed and added to ensure accurate representation of the captured image.

Security

By creating a production specific content and data management strategy, the digital lab increases the security of the productions digital assets.

Managing Risk

All of these factors contribute to managing and reducing risk in various areas such as; data loss and costly technical errors that might not be apparent until the project reaches conform. Whilst at the same time allowing the DIT to be fast, flexible and streamlined in their approach to servicing a production.

What We Offer

In-House

At the end of each shooting day, camera files are delivered to DIT Services for processing, transcoding, colour correction, & archiving. DIT Services supports a talented roster of dailies colorists & technicians who ensure the creative intent is consistent throughout the pipeline.

Mobile

Shooting too far from our Cardiff Office? We can offer custom, scalable, & efficient mobile post-production solutions for any location. Bringing all the benefits of a digital lab to your production.

  • Talented roster of local dailies colourists & technicians

  • Consultative workflow for camera, resolution, & codec decisions with the project’s creative & practical needs in mind

  • Customised colour pipelines including CDLs, LUTs, ACES, HDR & collaboration with final colourists

  • Experience supporting all file-based cameras

  • Robust archive pipeline backed by secure data verification

  • LTO archive generation and verification

  • Fast, efficient & safe dailies data management, processing, & transcoding

  • Checksum and duplicate data deliveries

  • Editorial deliverables in DnX or ProRes

  • Streamable dailies for PIX, DAX etc.

  • Package pricing for bundling Lab and On-Set/Near-Set DIT